The Flame Tree (18 page)

The Tuan Guru turned slightly to face Isaac. He bent at the waist, extending his clasped hands. Isaac automatically caught the Tuan Guru’s calloused hands between his palms.
“Allah umina amin
, Isak,” he said, his eyes twinkling.

Mr. Suherman salamed Isaac. He was smiling broadly and winked. “
Allah umina amin
. The peace of God be upon you,” he whispered.

That left Imam Ali. Isaac flicked a quick glance at the Imam’s face. It was suffused with anger and humiliation. He did not extend his hands. The Tuan Guru rested his eyes upon the Imam, saying nothing. Imam Ali’s dark face grew duskier yet with blood, and with great effort, he extended his hands. Isaac was equally loath to take them, these hands that only hours previously had mutilated him, but he did so, for there was nothing else he could do. He
barely touched the Imam’s scaly skin and then let his hands drop.

The entire congregation, the thousands of men and women and children, rose to their feet and, in one ringing voice that swirled out to infinity and crossed the bridge to paradise, proclaimed to Isaac, “The peace of God be upon you.”

Mr. Suherman led Isaac out of the prayer hall and down the northern arcade, shaded by the scalloped folds of the roofs overhang. A man with a video camera followed their progress. The walkway, made of patterned marble, stretched the length of the mosque. The open air to the left was curtained off by a thick and brilliant sunlight, transforming the arcade into a tunnel of shadow.

“Isak! Isak!” Ismail, in prayer garb, rushed out of the main prayer hall toward Isaac, his narrow face lively with a happy smile. Isaac stopped. “The Tuan Guru let you go,” Ismail said excitedly. “You know what that means? That means we can be friends again. Listen, how about I come by this afternoon? You know, the same place, the tree.”

Isaac glanced down at the bulge in his sarong.

Ismail’s gaze followed, his smile turning into a frown. “Oh. That. It’ll take a couple days before you feel like playing, I guess.” His smile returned. “But next week, okay? There’s a great
wayang kulit
show…” Ismail’s voice trailed off. “What’s wrong?”

“Go away,” Isaac said. “Just leave me alone.”

Mr. Suherman said, “Ismail, you are missing your prayers. Go back in and join the others.”

Ismail backed away, confusion pinching his face.

Mr. Suherman put his hand on Isaac’s back and moved him
forward. “There,” he said, gesturing with his other hand toward the end of the arcade. “Your parents are waiting there. Do you see them?” And then he vanished.

Beyond the far front steps of the mosque was a mass of people milling behind a sawhorse barricade. Most of them aimed cameras or held boom microphones. Upon seeing Isaac, they surged, with a barrage of firing cameras. A host of khaki-uniformed policemen held them back. In the front of the commotion stood Graham and Mary Williams, still as statues. Then Mary pulled her hand away from her husband’s and climbed over the sawhorse barricade to run toward Isaac. She opened her arms, and her familiar warm fragrance enveloped him. She released the embrace to hold his face in her hands, kissing him on his right cheek and his left cheek. His black cap toppled off his head. She was crying, her tears destroying the makeup that she had put on for this occasion. “Isaac, oh, Isaac.”

Graham Williams stepped up beside her, extending his hand. “Let’s go home, Isaac.”

I
SAAC, DRAPED IN A
hospital gown, stood by the window of a fourth-story hospital room that overlooked the alley and the residential compound beyond.

Reverend Biggs had prayed, “We shall know the place we left and know it joyously, as home.”

Aside from fresh plywood on the garage roof that replaced the burned patches and the “H” still visible on the front lawn, the compound was untouched. His house looked as it always had.

Maybe the tape of history could be played backward, the helicopters landing in reverse on that “H”, the staff and students descending backward from the ramps, into their former lives, no different from when they had left.

Except for Isaac, who would have been divided irrevocably into two. An uncircumcised Isaac would scramble backward to his perch in the flame tree, and from there, he would stare across the gap of time and of immutable events to a fourth-floor VIP room in the hospital occupied by the circumcised Isaac, who would return the stare.

If he climbed up to that perch now, what would he see? The tree had survived the rioting unharmed, but was it the same tree, created by God for the pleasures of children? It had lost most of its red blossoms. No leaves had sprouted. Its nude
branches looked not bare, but barren.

“I kept the faith,” Isaac whispered. “I said no.”

The reunion of American Christian parents with their son abducted by Indonesian Muslims was a headline news item, blending international politics and religious tensions with a human interest story that had, for the most part, a happy ending.

Later that evening, once he was released to the care of his parents and allowed to return home, Isaac watched that happy ending on CNN. The video cameras had captured his march down the exterior arcade toward his waiting parents. The cameras zoomed in on Mary scrambling over the sawhorse and sweeping her son into her arms for her embrace. They showed the world her tears and Isaac’s own dry eyes.

It took a long time for Isaac to fall asleep that night, but when he did, it was a sound sleep. The Lord of the Crows had not been vanquished, that Isaac well knew, but the creature had, for the moment, gone elsewhere.

The dawn azan from the Al-Furqon Mosque woke him. The call to prayer was considerably more muted than those broadcast several weeks ago. Isaac lay awake on his bed, legs spread to help relieve the throbbing of his swollen penis. The sliding door to the porch below whisked open. His mother was going outside for her dawn devotional. Isaac smelled the fragrance of her hot coffee. There rose the sibilant whisper of her prayer, the rising notes of her distress: “Lord, I have a wounded son. He hurts and needs
help that I can’t seem to provide. What am I to do?”

Isaac got out of bed and slipped into his sarong and a T-shirt. He shuffled barefoot to the toolshed on the perimeter of the residence side of the compound. He searched in the musty corners until he found what he wanted. He made his slow, pained way to the flame tree. Dawn had broken behind gray clouds gathered around the volcanic peaks far to the west. The tree’s bare branches looked sick and spindly against an uncertain sky. He loosely tucked the hem of the sarong into the waist fold. Holding the tool with one hand, he awkwardly climbed the flame tree. The scab on his penis broke. He ignored the blood dripping down his thigh and onto the branches that he climbed upon.

For a minute he sat on his perch.

At the Al-Furqon Mosque the Muslims of the community gathered once more, but instead of engaging in the spiritual warfare of
kunut nazilah
, they performed
salat al-istisqa
, the ritual prayer for rain. The speakers on the minaret were silent, but Isaac could hear on the still and turgid air the new Imam reciting the Qur’an and the people responding earnestly with “
Allahumma asqina
.” O Allah, send down rain upon us.

Isaac got up from his perch. He found a steady position and began to cut the branches of his perch with the saw in his hand.

A boy left the mosque and crossed the street. He stood underneath the tree and called up to Isaac. Isaac ignored him and continued sawing. One branch after another fell to the ground. When all the perch branches had fallen, Isaac glanced down at the sidewalk. Ismail was gone.

A
MASS OF GRAY CLOUDS
swirling low to the earth diluted Sunday’s sunrise. An hour later it was drizzling. Isaac attended church with his parents. His shield put a peculiar bulge in the crotch of his trousers, so he wore a straight-cut batik shirt, the hem of which came down near his knees.

Canvas tenting stretched over the burned remains of the Maranatha Church. The congregation sat on folding metal chairs. The air still had the acrid scent of smoke and ash. Empty holes in the scorched brickwork marked where windows had once been. The beautiful stained-glass artwork was now colorful shards sprinkled in the piles of rubble by the irrigation ditch.

“God has answered our prayers for rain,” Pastor Cornelius said.

Isaac assumed that the Muslims of the Al-Furqon Mosque were also taking credit.

He did not sing the hymns, nor did he stand for the prayers. His mother whispered for him to, but he shook his head. During the closing benediction she sat with him, holding his hand.

The rain fell steadily, not a flooding rain, but a blessing rain that was avidly drunk by a thirsty land. The rain kept falling without a break. Sometime in the night a tremendous crack rent
the sodden evening, followed immediately by an earthshaking thud. The noise jolted awake the entire neighborhood, still skittery about unexpected events and alarms. Graham Williams rushed outside in his pajamas. Isaac waddled as fast he could behind him. The security guards were already out in the schoolyard, their high-intensity flashlights shooting blazing beams that reflected off the falling motes of water. They quickly found the cause of the noise.

The flame tree had drunk too greedily of the miraculous groundwater. The first major branch, about five feet in diameter, had sheared off under its own gluttonous weight. It lay on the ground like a savagely severed appendage. Splayed splinters the size of a man’s forearm marked where branch and tree had joined.

By early morning the rain had ceased. Before going to the hospital, Graham sat down on the edge of Isaac’s bed. He said, “Trees don’t live forever, Isaac. They get old and die like people. We’re going to have to cut down the rest of the flame tree before more of it falls and hurts somebody.”

Isaac rolled the edge of the bedsheet between his fingers. “I know,” he said.

Graham watched Isaac’s restless fingers. “About you going to America—there isn’t really any other alternative.”

“What grade am I going to be in?”

A long silence, broken at last by Graham’s sigh. “I don’t know.” He glanced at his watch. “I have to go. See you tonight.”

Isaac watched the work crew cut down the wounded tree. He sat on the steps of the closed school, his knees spread under his
sarong. The workmen used ropes and double-handed pull saws. The tree was not toppled, but dismantled branch by branch.

It took all day for the work crew to cut down the tree. Isaac watched the last load leave in the hospital’s rusty pickup. The pickup returned with a load of rich loamy dirt escorted by the new gardener, a young, crinkly-haired Christian. Isaac didn’t know his name. He started to mend the gaping hole in the ground that the uprooted stump had left.

Isaac watched the gardener fill in the hole. Burying the dead, in a way, although there’d be no tombstone here.

That afternoon somebody delivered a package to the security post. The guards thought it was a bomb. Isaac, who saw the commotion and heard the description of the man who had dropped it off, marched over. To the guards’ spluttering horror, he ripped open the taped folds of the wrapping paper. “See, it’s just a book.” He riffled the pages.

“Why, it’s the Qur’an,” Mr. Theophilus said.

Not just any Qur’an but Mr. Suherman’s copy of Pickthall’s translation. On the first page Mr. Suherman had written,
To Isaac, a child of the Book: May you grow in the grace of Almighty God, and may you do so in peace wherever you live
.

Isaac took the Qur’an up to his room. He put it down next to his devotional Bible, which he hadn’t touched since he’d come home. Nothing happened. There was no annihilation of matter and antimatter. He left the Qur’an where it was.

What kept Isaac awake that night was neither pain nor
nightmares, but the Qur’an on the dresser. Isaac was a usurper in this room, trying to sleep a usurper’s sleep. One day the real uncircumcised Isaac was going to return and exclaim, Who’s been sleeping in my bed?
Who’s brought strange Scriptures into my room?

He must have slept for some time that night, but he once again was awake before dawn. His mother was on the porch below. She was angry at somebody. Even though she spoke quietly so that Isaac could not make out the words, he knew that tone of voice, full of his mother’s famed and monumental anger.

He stole down the stairs and to the end of the darkened hallway leading to the garden porch. Mary sat on her rattan chair, her Bible open on her lap under the porch lamp, and spoke out into the gathering light. She said in that flat-trajectoried, armor-piercing tone, “You say that you are close to the brokenhearted and that you save those who are crushed in spirit. It says so right here in your holy word.” She tapped the page. “Well? Where are you? Is this verse meaningless, then? I think so. I’ve been waiting and waiting. I don’t think this verse belongs in the Bible. I’ll just remove it.” She ripped the page, crumpled it in her fist, and tossed it aside. It landed next to another crumpled page.

“And what about this promise of yours?” she said, turning to another passage. “‘Do not fear, for I am with you.’ Oh?” The “oh” was a parody of surprise. Mary ripped this page out of her devotional Bible too, crumpled it and threw it.

Isaac cringed, waiting for the terrible whirlwind of fire. Nothing happened. Mary inexorably continued with her list of
judgments. She continued to weigh God according to His stated promises and found Him wanting. With each judgment, she ripped out another a page of her Bible.

Finally and most awfully, she accused Him of lying: “This is what you said: ‘Never will I leave you, never will I forsake you.’” She was quiet for a moment, staring at her mutilated Bible, the pages torn from it littered around her feet, and then at the last torn page still in her hand. She lifted her head and in a quiet and terrible voice said, “Where were you for my son? Where are you for me? Why have you abandoned us?”

The words and his mother’s anguish settled in the crevasses of Isaac’s own soul. But if God would not give her comfort, how could he? If God would not answer, what words could he give?

Then he knew. He knew what was needed, both for him and for her. The knowledge came with urgency. He pushed open the door. “Mom, Mom, get dressed, we have to go.”

For a moment she stared blankly at him. “Isaac?”

He grabbed her hand and tugged it, trying to pull her out of the chair. “Get dressed, we have to go.”

“Go? Go where?”

“We have to go see the Tuan Guru right now.”

“The Tuan Guru?” A heartbeat. “The Tuan Guru,” she breathed out, and the exhalation dried her moist eyes and changed them to disks of slate. She stood. “Where is he?”

“Up in the mountains, at a pesantren school. Hurry up, let’s go.”

“Isaac, as much as I want to confront the man, I’m not about to take you back into that lion’s den.”

“I want to see him.”

“Isaac—”

“Please, Mom. He’s not going to hurt me. He’s not going to let anybody hurt me. He let me go, didn’t he?” His mother was still shaking her head. Isaac said, “Mom. I
need
to see him.”

Her head stilled. She studied Isaac and then said, “Perhaps you do.”

Fifteen minutes later Mary and Isaac Williams were in the Kijang van with the darkened windows, heading down Hayam Wuruk Avenue. She had put on a business suit and jewelry and makeup. She drove swiftly. Isaac put together the route out of town in his head, recalling the cries of bus conductors, tracing a line backward until they came to the foot of the mountains and then up into them.

Two hours into their drive, they caught up to a truck with a load of young Madurese racing bulls tethered in the back, swaying and scrabbling to keep their balance as the truck took the curves.

On the outskirts of the town of Gambang a gaggle of girls in full green dresses and green jilbabs descended from a hired bus, out on a picnic to a nearby waterfall advertised by a large roadside sign. Girls from a Nahdlatul Umat Islam pesantren.

“We’re getting close,” Isaac murmured, staring at them.

Up here on the higher mountain slopes the weather-beaten houses and mosques hunkered down to the earth in a land that was closer and more susceptible to the capricious elements of water and fire. Scents and colors were crisper, even the stinks and the
mud-mottled hues. The sky was so clear that it seemed to be tinged with the purple of the upper atmosphere.

They passed a mosque that proudly stood in splendor of spotless whitewash, immaculate green paint, and gleaming silver dome. A banner urged parents to enroll children in the mosque’s Qur’an and Arabic classes, taught by qualified teachers from the Nahdlatul Umat Islam pesantren. In fact, classes were being held that morning. They were presently in recess. Young children played games in the front yard, supervised by older girls and women in full dresses and green jilbabs.

One round-faced woman caught a wayward volleyball and tossed it back to a circle of screeching children. As she did so she caught sight of the Kijang driving past. She paused and stared at the car’s occupants.

Mary and Isaac followed the truck, rattling over a one-lane bridge that spanned a mossy, boulder-strewn stream flowing at the bottom of a deep crevasse with ferny sides. A hundred yards beyond the bridge land had been cleared into pasture. A rutted vehicle track led from the asphalt road to stables and a few smaller shacks. To the right of the stables was a bamboo-fenced paddock. To the left of the stables, behind square-topped hedges and a row of coffee trees, were the low, graceful buildings of the Nahdlatul Umat Islam pesantren, graciously proportioned out of gleaming whitewashed walls and wide slabs of glass. But in the middle of the elegant complex there rose an ugly, three-story building, something that the Dutch might have built a century previously. Isaac saw on the outside of the building the stairs that he had laboriously climbed, trembling with malaria,
and descended two weeks later, equally laboriously, with a codpiece under his sarong. The building was now roofless and a throng of construction workers swarmed over the top story, knocking down walls.

Mary stopped the car on the edge of the road. The truck they had followed trundled across the unfenced field to the stables. The trainer, dressed in sarong and rubber sandals and chewing betel nut, was already waiting. He spat a thick stream of red fluid onto the ground. The driver got out and, after a quick hello and a yawning stretch, lowered the truck’s rear gate. He dragged a ramp from the side of the truck bed and put that in place.

A group of pesantren adults strolled through the coffee trees, heading for the truck. They were all male, dressed in the flowing garments of Islamic scholars. Leading them, a half step in front, was Tuan Guru Haji Abdullah Abubakar, his turban-wrapped head as unmistakable as a lighthouse.

Mary slowly exhaled.

The Tuan Guru walked up the ramp at the rear of the truck with the agility and balance of a much younger man. He had a quick look at the bulls and their tethering. Satisfied, he descended and gestured to the trainer to start unloading them one by one for a closer examination.

The first young bull descended, and the old man began running his hands over its muscles.

Mary Williams tilted the rearview mirror and examined her makeup. Her war paint was still without blemish. The scent of her perfume had become the pheromones of battle. “Let’s go have a chat with him, shall we?” she murmured.

They got out of the car and began walking across the expanse of grass in the humped middle of the vehicle ruts. Mary kept her attention on the Tuan Guru, avoiding stumbles and a couple of cow pies with nearly extrasensory perception.

The men gathered around the bulls did not at first notice their approach. One lifted his head and saw the tall blond woman striding toward him, and the joke he was making dribbled into silence without the punch line. The others followed his gaze, and they, too, fell silent.

The Tuan Guru did not look up. He continued his examination of the animal’s chest, tapping it with a cupped hand.

Mary halted several feet from the Tuan Guru’s back. Isaac stood close to her. She stared at the Tuan Guru’s turbaned head. The other men stared at her. The Tuan Guru gave no indication that he was aware of her and Isaac’s presence.

The trainer put his hand to his mouth and cleared his throat, but before he could say anything to alert the old man, the Tuan Guru said into the animal’s ear, “
Al-salamu alaikum
, Isak.”

Isaac answered automatically, “
Alaikum as-salam
, Tuan Guru.”

Still addressing the animal, the Tuan Guru said in Indonesian, “Is this your mother you have brought with you?” He shifted his tapping hand to another spot on the calf’s chest.

“
Inggih
, Tuan Guru.”

“
Al-salamu alaikum
, Ibu Isak,” he said, addressing Mary as Isaac’s mother.

Mary Williams said nothing.

The Tuan Guru continued to speak as he tapped the calf’s
chest. “You are a doctor, Ibu Isak. You know something of mammal physiology. These Madurese racing bulls are a lowland animal, but I bring them up here to train at high altitude to increase their stamina.”

He gave the calf one last chest tap and then turned around to face Mary. Their gazes locked. He was at least two heads shorter than her, turban included, yet such was the strength of his presence that they seemed to be looking at each other on the same eye level.

He said, “Some years ago I read about Olympic athletes training at high altitude. I thought what works for humans must work for bulls. If I may ask, what is your considered and expert opinion? Am I correct in making this assumption?”